But since the researchers were unable to collect samples, they are still unable to say exactly what these sponges and other fungi might be eating. Some sponges filter organic detritus from the water, while others are carnivorous, feeding on tiny animals. “Sin this would be your top headline of the year, ”said Christopher Mah, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian, who was not involved in the research. “Killing sponges, living in the dark, cold recess of Antarctica, where no life can survive. ”
And Griffiths and his team still can’t say if there are moving creatures like fish and bark living around the rock – the camera didn’t look at all – so it’s not clear if it’s some kind of prey. some of the secular animals. “Do they all eat the same food source?” asked Griffiths. “Or are some of them going to get nourishment from each other? Or are more mobile animals somehow providing food for this community? ” These are all questions that can only be answered once more.
Sediment around the rock does not appear to be too heavy, meaning the animals are not in danger of being buried. “It’s kind of a Goldilocks thing going,” Griffiths says from what appears to be rocky, “where it just gets enough food coming in, and there’s nothing that is wants to eat them – as far as we can tell – and is not buried with too much sediment. “(In the sediment surrounding the rock, the researchers noticed ripples that are usually formed by currents, thus reinforcing the theory that food is carried here from ancient times.)
It is also unclear how these stationery animals arrived in the first place. “Was it something very local, where they were hopping from a local boulder to a local boulder?” asked Griffiths. On the other hand, their parents may have lived on a rock hundreds of miles away – where the ice shelf ends and more conventional marine ecosystems begin – and release the smear. and their eggs to travel in the streams.
Since Griffiths and his colleagues do not have samples, they also cannot say how old these animals are. Antarctic sponges have been known to live for thousands of years, so it is possible that this is a true ecosystem. The rock may have been seeded with life long ago, but streams have also been renewed with extra life over thousands of years.
The researchers also cannot say whether this rock is anomalous, or whether such ecosystems are common under the ice. The geologists may not have just got lucky when they dropped their camera into the rock – these animal communities may be a regular feature on the seabed beneath Antarctica ‘s ice shelves. There would certainly be plenty of room for ecosystems like that: These floating ice shelves stretch for 560,000 square miles. However, through previous excavations, scientists have only studied a place below that is the size of a tennis court. So they may be out in numbers, and we haven’t found them yet.
And we may be running out of time to do just that. This rock may be locked away under half a mile of ice, but that ice is still growing on a warming planet. “Some of these huge ice shelves have the potential to collapse in the future,” says Griffiths, “and we could lose a unique ecosystem. ”
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